Book Review: 'The Death and Life of the Great American School System' by Diane RavitchDiane Ravitch's Death and Life of the Great American School System is a scathing report card of U.S. education. The former assistant secretary of education hands down a withering critique of the nation's schooling efforts — from charter schools, to No Child Left Behind, to Teach for America.

The 'Great American School System' Flunks Out

The Death and Life of the Great American School SystemBy Diane RavitchHardcover, 296 pagesBasic BooksList price: $26.95

"Schools operate fundamentally — or should operate — like families," author Diane Ravitch said in a Morning Edition interview. "The fundamental principle by which education proceeds is collaboration."
Jack Miller
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Jack Miller

"Schools operate fundamentally — or should operate — like families," author Diane Ravitch said in a Morning Edition interview. "The fundamental principle by which education proceeds is collaboration."

Jack Miller

A distinguished historian of public schools in the United States, Diane Ravitch isn't easy to categorize politically. She was assistant secretary of education in the administration of President George H.W. Bush. Bill Clinton appointed her to the National Assessment Governing Board, which supervises national testing. And in The Language Police, Ravitch lambasted educational administrators on the left and right for sacrificing truth, literary quality and disciplinary content in the textbooks they ordered and the exams they authorized.

In The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Ravitch continues to call 'em as she sees 'em, even when she's pillorying policies she's previously praised. Drawing on an avalanche of data, she now argues, passionately and persuasively, that school choice, testing and accountability, the shibboleths everyone in the educational establishment applauds, are actually degrading the intellectual capacity of students.

On average, Ravitch reveals, students in charter schools do not outperform their counterparts in public schools. Charter schools achieving apparently dazzling results often cook the books by accepting few English language learners, students with special education needs, or those with disciplinary problems.

In a withering assault on the No Child Left Behind legislation of President George W. Bush, Ravitch demonstrates that accountability based solely on test scores has been a disaster. By measuring success only in relation to exams in reading and mathematics, and stigmatizing and sanctioning schools that do not make "adequate yearly progress," NCLB provides perverse incentives to "teach to the test" and devote less time to science, social studies, history, geography, foreign languages, art and music. And for administrators to get "breathtaking results" by quietly dumbing-down tests or lowering the "cut score" (passing grade).

The Death and Life of the Great American School System leaves virtually no educational icon unscathed. Despite an impressive and idealistic corps of volunteers, Ravitch cites studies indicating that Teach for America may not improve the quality of education in poor and rural school districts. She breaks a "conspiracy of silence" to indict mega-rich philanthropies, including the Gates, Walton and Broad foundations, for high-jacking the educational agenda — and taking it in the wrong direction.

Ravitch concludes her terrific and timely book with a plea that the best way to enhance education is to rescue the curriculum from the culture wars, set rigorous statewide or national standards for content, and improve the conditions in which teachers work and students learn, rather than "squabbling over how school systems should be organized, managed, and controlled." Millions of minds, after all, are terrible things to waste.

Excerpt: 'The Death and Life of the Great American School System'

March 16, 201011:53 AM ET

Diane Ravitch

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education By Diane RavitchHardcover, 296 pagesBasic BooksList price: $26.95

In the fall of 2007, I reluctantly decided to have my office repainted. It was inconvenient. I work at home, on the top floor of a nineteenth-century brownstone in Brooklyn. Not only did I have to stop working for three weeks, but I had the additional burden of packing up and removing everything in my office. I had to relocate fifty boxes of books and files to other rooms in the house until the painting job was complete.

After the patching, plastering, and painting was done, I began unpacking twenty years of papers and books, discarding those I no longer wanted, and placing articles into scrapbooks. You may wonder what all this mundane stuff has to do with my life in the education field. I found that the chore of reorganizing the artifacts of my professional life was pleasantly ruminative. It had a tonic effect, because it allowed me to reflect on the changes in my views over the years.

At the very time that I was packing up my books and belongings, I was going through an intellectual crisis. I was aware that I had undergone a wrenching transformation in my perspective on school reform. Where once I had been hopeful, even enthusiastic, about the potential benefits of testing, accountability, choice, and markets, I now found myself experiencing profound skepticism about these same ideas. I was trying to sort through the evidence about what was working and what was not. I was trying to understand why I was increasingly skeptical about these reforms, reforms that I had supported enthusiastically. I was trying to see my way through the blinding assumptions of ideology and politics, including my own. I kept asking myself why I was losing confidence in these reforms. My answer: I have a right to change my mind. Fair enough. But why, I kept wondering, why had I changed my mind? What was the compelling evidence that prompted me to reevaluate the policies I had endorsed many times over the previous decade? Why did I now doubt ideas I once had advocated?

The short answer is that my views changed as I saw how these ideas were working out in reality. The long answer is what will follow in the rest of this book. When someone chastised John Maynard Keynes for reversing himself about a particular economic policy he had previously endorsed, he replied, 'When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?' This comment may or may not be apocryphal, but I admire the thought behind it. It is the mark of a sentient human being to learn from experience, to pay close attention to how theories work out when put into practice.

What should we think of someone who never admits error, never entertains doubt but adheres unflinchingly to the same ideas all his life, regardless of new evidence? Doubt and skepticism are signs of rationality. When we are too certain of our opinions, we run the risk of ignoring any evidence that conflicts with our views. It is doubt that shows we are still thinking, still willing to reexamine hardened beliefs when confronted with new facts and new evidence.

The task of sorting my articles gave me the opportunity to review what I had written at different times, beginning in the mid-1960s. As I flipped from article to article, I kept asking myself, how far had I strayed from where I started? Was it like me to shuffle off ideas like an ill-fitting coat? As I read and skimmed and remembered, I began to see two themes at the center of what I have been writing for more than four decades. One constant has been my skepticism about ill-considered fads, enthusiasms, movements, and theories. The other has been a deep belief in the value of a rich, coherent school curriculum, especially in history and literature, both of which are so frequently ignored, trivialized, or politicized.

Over the years, I have consistently warned against the lure of 'the royal road to learning,' the notion that some savant or organization has found an easy solution to the problems of American education. As a historian of education, I have often studied the rise and fall of grand ideas that were promoted as the sure cure for whatever ills were afflicting our schools and students. In 1907, William Chandler Bagley complained about the 'fads and reforms that sweep through the educational system at periodic intervals.' A few years later, William Henry Maxwell, the esteemed superintendent of schools in New York City, heaped scorn on educational theorists who promoted their panaceas to gullible teachers; one, he said, insisted that 'vertical penmanship' was the answer to all problems; another maintained that recess was a 'relic of barbarism.' Still others wanted to ban spelling and grammar to make school more fun. I have tried to show in my work the persistence of our national infatuation with fads, movements, and reforms, which invariably distract us from the steadiness of purpose needed to improve our schools. In our own day, policymakers and business leaders have eagerly enlisted in a movement launched by free-market advocates, with the support of major foundations. Many educators have their doubts about the slogans and cure-alls of our time, but they are required to follow the mandates of federal law (such as No Child Left Behind) despite their doubts.

In our day, school reformers sometimes resemble the characters in Dr. Seuss's Solla Sollew, who are always searching for that mythical land 'where they never have troubles, at least very few.' Or like Dumbo, they are convinced they could fly if only they had a magic feather. In my writings, I have consistently warned that, in education, there are no shortcuts, no utopias, and no silver bullets. For certain, there are no magic feathers that enable elephants to fly.

As I flipped through the yellowing pages in my scrapbooks, I started to understand the recent redirection of my thinking, my growing doubt regarding popular proposals for choice and accountability. Once again, I realized, I was turning skeptical in response to panaceas and miracle cures. The only difference was that in this case, I too had fallen for the latest panaceas and miracle cures; I too had drunk deeply of the elixir that promised a quick fix to intractable problems. I too had jumped aboard a bandwagon, one festooned with banners celebrating the power of accountability, incentives, and markets. I too was captivated by these ideas. They promised to end bureaucracy, to ensure that poor children were not neglected, to empower poor parents, to enable poor children to escape failing schools, and to close the achievement gap between rich and poor, black and white. Testing would shine a spotlight on low-performing schools, and choice would create opportunities for poor kids to leave for better schools. All of this seemed to make sense, but there was little empirical evidence, just promise and hope. I wanted to share the promise and the hope. I wanted to believe that choice and accountability would produce great results. But over time, I was persuaded by accumulating evidence that the latest reforms were not likely to live up to their promise. The more I saw, the more I lost the faith.

From The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch. Copyright 2010. Excerpted by arrangement with Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group.